What Are Video Shorts Or Reels?

What Are Video Shorts Or Reels?

If you have been on any of our social media pages lately, you may have noticed a lot of activity with video shorts or reels as they are sometimes known. Unlike our past early videos and our official music videos which were a few minutes long, video shorts or reels are quite short in duration as the term implies. Quite often these clips are only 15 to 30 seconds long on average.

We have been posting such clips because these are the current rage right now in terms of helping Unity Power Force get more exposure, especially on TikTok. The other social media platforms including Instagram, YouTube and even Facebook are following suit with short videos areas of their own since most viewers out there have only the patience for short clips if they don’t already know the creators behind these videos.

So Unity Power Force will try to post an average of two short clips daily as we try to get noticed by new eyeballs out there. This is not to say that we won’t produce longer videos anymore as we will continue to produce full length music videos and other longer content of interest but the majority of videos we shoot each week will be in short form.

Sometimes a few different short videos will be extracted from our longer full length videos to give new viewers short samples of what we are all about to hopefully entice them to eventually watch our full version music videos and go to Spotify to stream our songs.

Here’s an example of a video short we extracted from a full version video which in this case is from our official lyrics video for In Harmony.

Types Of Video Shorts We Will Post

Although pretty well all video shorts we will post will be focused on our music, you will find that we will produce a variety of clips that cover a few different topics. We will also post ‘behind the scenes’ type of clips that show a bit on how our music and music videos were produced.

We produced a series of dance clips to In Harmony with two volunteer dancers and are still open to shooting more such clips if we get more volunteers (contact me if interested in being one of our future dancers). Here’s one of Alina’s dance videos.

An additional type of musical video short you will start to see from Unity Power Force is my guitar playing as I will play different parts from songs on both my electric and acoustic guitars. Since many TikTok videos that get a lot of views tend to be on the crazy and zany side, I decided to play a bit from our acoustic guitar instrumental called Hope in scuba gear below. This is not something you see everyday!

Even though Hope is a pretty short song at about one minute and 17 seconds, it’s still considered a bit too long to be considered a video short as a minute is usually the maximum length. So to see the full length, just go to our Hope webpage.

Other times you might see sports related video shorts since some of us do like sports and these clips can related back to our Shoot It In The Net song. Other times you might see dog and marine life videos since some of us at Unity Power Force also have pets and like animals. We do manage to tie in such topics that seem unrelated back to our music when we use parts from our songs as the audio background. This hopefully helps expose new viewers to our music.

Here’s a video short I produced from a clip from one of my scuba diving outings and tied it in with In Harmony.

Here’s an example of one of our video shorts about our beloved Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team that has had a long history of not winning when most needed.

We may even throw in the odd social commentary on recent community or international issues but we will always try to tie them into one of our songs. This is how we originally connected social issues with our song In Harmony which is an antiracism and antidiscrimination song.

Another big difference with our video shorts besides the much shorter durations is that the format will be vertical rather than horizontal. Vertical has been the format for video shorts since most viewers are watching these clips on cellphones rather than on laptop computers. So I do have to go through extra steps during the video production to convert video that was shot in horizontal format to vertical. Our longer full length videos will remain in horizontal formats.

The Unity Power Force YouTube Channel

You will see our video shorts on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook Reels but not our full length videos though. This is because these social media platforms tend to specialize on short videos and longer duration clips just don’t seem to be successful in getting many views.

YouTube is different though which is why you will see both our short and long form videos at our YouTube channel. To make things easier for our YouTube viewers, we have created different playlists within our YouTube channel. You will find our official full version music videos including our lyrics videos on a playlist called Official Music Videos while all the video shorts will be on a separate playlist named simply as Shorts.

So if you want to scan through all our video shorts in order to see what we’ve been posting, just head over to our YouTube channel by clicking on the YouTube graphic below and then click on the Shorts playlist once you are at our channel.

All the other social media Unity Power Force is active on are linked by their platform graphics below for your convenience and you will see our video shorts posted at whichever of these social media you usually use.